UVU Children's Lit Forum

I spent today at the UVU Forum for Children's Lit. Man, today was one of the best days. I apparently didn't take as good of notes as Ben (I'm not organized enough to list it out that way, anyway).

The day started off with me waking up at 8:20 and I was supposed to be at UVU by 9am. Crap. I actually made it in time for the keynote which was Shannon Hale. Let me just say that I had never read anything by her before, so I picked up a copy of "Princess Academy" and polished that off yesterday. Pretty good book. It's a Newberry Honor winner, and it really got me into the story. But Shannon herself is one of the most fun speakers. She had me on the floor laughing through her keynote and her later presentation on "What I Wish I'd Known."

Following the keynote we had a panel with several different individuals (including my idol and teacher, Carol Lynch Williams) who gave several different books that they loved. It wasn't my favorite part of the conference, but I got some great ideas of the books I can read next. Which I guess was kind of the point. This conference was also for librarians and grade school teachers, so I'm sure they got more out of it than me.

I also really liked Abby Ranger's presentation on "Revising Your Novel." She's an editor at Hiperion and had a lot of great ideas about going back through your book. I'm not entirely sure I could wait the two months that she recommended before revising your novel, but she had a lot of great points about looking at your book through fresh eyes.

Lunch was good, if not a little boring. I'm not all that interested in the process of how Newberry Medals are picked. If I ever get one, great, if not, oh well.

The last presentation I attended was by Emily Wing Smith about voice. I think I got a lot from hers, too. If there's anything I have a problem with, it's voice. I've actually heard her speak before, but for some reason I got a great idea to push my second novel forward, and now I'm a few pages in. This book will be mostly about the character, a pretty good shift from my first novel which has a pretty action-packed plot. We'll see how well it goes.

I'm attending the second day of the conference tomorrow, so I'll post more then!